Family History… reaching beyond the names and dates.

Category Archives: FamilySearch

I was putting together a lesson for Saturday’s genealogy class, looking over the digital record collections on FamilySearch, when I stumbled across “United States, Freedmans Bank Records, 1865-1874.” At IGHR this past June Deborah Abbott had described the wealth of information recorded about account holders, so on a whim I clicked the link and started reading.

Boy, is she right! “Lafayette Robinson… has always lived in Huntsville… father John resides corner of Gallatin and Holmes… mother Ann died 15 or 16 years ago… brothers… step-mother… sisters…” What a gold mine! I couldn’t stop reading.

Samuel Carter’s entry brought me up short. In “Remarks,” above the X that marks Samuel’s signature, is written “Was brought away from home when so small that you don’t know parents or any of his relatives.” Samuel was living in Huntsville by the time he opened his bank account on October 1, 1867, but his bank record notes that he formerly lived in Marshall County, Alabama. There are a few more details: he turned 24 on the third of last March, he is not married, he lives in an alley between Church and Mill Street in Huntsville, his complexion is black, he works on the railroad. He attends the Baptist Church. He was born in Georgia—“Don’t know place.”[i]

I want to find Samuel’s parents.

There are a few leads. The surname Carter; lived in Marshall County, now in Huntsville; railroad; age 24 in 1867, so born in Georgia around 1843. I quickly found him in the 1870 census: now 26, working in a machine shop, born in Georgia, still single. He can read, though he can’t write.[ii] Can I find him in the Alabama State census in 1866? Yes: he’s in Marshall County. Household of one male, age 20-30. And look! Right after his name is another Carter. Jim Carter. Also a single male, age 20-30. [iii] Perhaps another clue?

Hypothesis: a slaveholder in Marshall County named Carter owned at least two males slaves, one born around 1843, and another in the same age range.

Can I find such a man in the 1860 US slave census? There are four possible candidates (all incorrectly indexed on ancestry.com as Caster or Canter): Joseph M Carter in the Eastern Division of Marshall County who owned 16 slaves, including two 18-year-old boys; Charles Carter in the Western Division who owned six slaves, including one 19-year-old and one 16-year-old boy; and two other Carters enumerated on the slave schedules immediately after Charles: Martin and Thomas, who owned one slave each, both 15-year-old boys.[iv]

I don’t have an end to the story yet. This is completely new territory for me—I’ve never researched slave records, and I have a lot to learn. That’s the danger of family history, isn’t it? These names pop out at you from the images, and they take on a life of their own and then take over yours. There are so many questions I wish but know I may never be able to answer: How did Samuel come to work on the railroad? How had he learned to read, such a short time after the War? I discovered that Sam married and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, but haven’t found him in later censuses.[v] Why Memphis?

Share this:

I thought long and hard about which topic to tackle with this, my first blog. It’s not so much an issue of first impressions and wanting to make this one count, as I think it’s a safe bet that this first blog will find its readership only among those who have known me long and well. But this first blog is setting me on a path, and I want to make it a path worth my following.

So what is so important about the FamilySearch website’s Family Tree that out of all the topics I could choose, this one so quickly floated to the top and stayed there? It has to do with why family history (and I prefer that term to genealogy) is so near and dear to my heart.

Family history—the history of family. By extension, the history of community. Ultimately, the history of society and civilization. The history of human interaction, of distribution of opportunity, of collaboration and conflict. Until very, very recently, historians restricted themselves to the study of famous men and outstanding acts of vice or valor or creativity. Why? Well, the data management was just a lot easier. Think about it—how much data must one collect to understand the life of one man? Multiply that by a thousand, ten-thousand, a million…. Family history has simply been beyond the practical capabilities of historians. How can you amass, assemble, and analyze the quantity of data necessary to lay clear the patterns of interaction that shaped an entire community of individuals? Where do you store all that information while you’re collecting it? How do you make it available to the number of research historians necessary to tackle a project like understanding family history at a global scale?

This project will need some organization really big, simply to have the space to store a vast amount of detailed information, about every individual that ever left his or her name in a record, manuscript, or oral history.

Collecting and organizing this database is going to take a long, long time. We need an organization that we can count on lasting not five or ten or fifty years, but centuries.

It needs to be an open database that allows an unlimited number of researchers to contribute data and to access that data for analysis. Given the scope of this project, the number of researchers involved will need to number in the thousands. Remember, we’re not just talking about collecting vital statistics, but the raw details of everyday life that historians will need in order to understand every facet of a community’s life. Think of all those manuscript collections that languish yet unindexed and undigitized: letters, journals, newspapers, business ledgers, agency reports…

Let’s not talk about cost—but I’ll simply say that I am grateful that someone has undertaken this venture without asking me to pay for it. (OK, indexing aside.)

Yes, I’m talking about the FamilySearch.org website’s Family Tree.

I know, I know! I do know it’s full of garbage. It is the New Jersey landfill of databases. You can’t go three generations in any direction without finding enough nonsense to fill a volume of Lewis Carroll poetry.

But hold on a moment. You’re all family historians, so let me take you back to a scene from our nation’s early history:

William and Sarah Pilgrim have just topped the crest of the last hill. At the ridge line, William spreads his arms wide. “Sarah, dear, this is where we’ll make our home.”

Where would we be now if Sarah had taken one look and answered “For heaven’s sake, Bill! You’ll never get a crop on this—it’s all trees!”